


lungs were full

by TaleWorthTelling



Category: Agent Carter (TV), Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning, Steve Rogers casts a big shadow
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-18
Updated: 2015-05-18
Packaged: 2018-03-31 04:28:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3964399
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TaleWorthTelling/pseuds/TaleWorthTelling
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Angie doesn't ask about Peggy's life before. Usually.</p>
            </blockquote>





	lungs were full

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "We Thought Your Hearts Were Beating", by From Indian Lakes.

It's not like Peggy to be sentimental. She'd like to be, at times; she certainly feels the pull of it now and again. But to allow it ... certainly not. Not like her to play house as a child would. 

But she buys the damned sketchbook anyway, as she imagines she would have in another life, one where she would come home to find him waiting, and he'd thank her and tell her he'd been meaning to buy a new one, and she'd tell him she knew, she'd watched him fill up the last one. She hadn't even cared about art before Steve. She can invent uses for the thing, really just a simple pad of paper with a binding, because she's always writing something or other down: endless lists, bits of symbols or codes swirling around 'til she finds their significance, layouts of buildings, doodles to clear her head when it's stuffed to the gills. 

So it's not a waste, but it is a lie. A kind lie for a kinder world. A sketchbook that Steve Rogers will never draw in, a book that will never see creativity but rather only necessity.

Except one day when she comes home, Angie has it open in her lap, cross-legged and constantly smoothing down her skirt to be decent. The fingers of one hand are crimping the edges, absentmindedly pinching her fingers between the pages as if it helps her concentration; the other hand is wrapped around a bitten pencil that flows across the page in motions unlike Steve's artistic style at all. She holds the pencil more delicately than he had in some ways, and in others with less finesse and surety. But her face is the same, and it steals Peggy's breath.

She clears her throat to be polite, let Angie know she's there, and goes to draw the blinds and let in the waning early evening light of late summer. 

"Oh, hey, Peg," she says cheerfully, unashamed. "Hope you don't mind, I figured I'd give it a try. Always looking to update my skills, you know?"

Peggy smiles, unable to really say much. 

Angie's face falls a little. "Something wrong?"

"No, no," Peggy is quick to reassure. "I'm glad. It's silly, really. It's good someone's getting some use out of it."

Angie doesn't speak for a moment, flipping the cover open and closed between her hands while she looks at Peggy in that measured way she has, the one that's like a patient cat and an x-ray all at once. "This about your man?"

Peggy opens her mouth to deny it, shocked because Angie often looks like she wants to ask that very question, but so far never has.

Angie shakes her head and puts the book aside, stretching her legs out before her and adjusting her skirt yet again. "It's alright, Peg. I can tell. And you can talk about him, you know. It helps."

She can't, not really. It's a struggle to decide what she can and cannot tell her friend about the time in her life that hangs heavy over her thoughts even now. And some days that struggle is too much, too exhausting, and it's easier to say nothing.

"I had a boy go off to war," Angie continues. "I didn't go with him. And he didn't come back. We weren't really ... He and I never were never ... But it didn't matter, you know? He was this ... life I was never gonna have. And he was a good person."

"I didn't go with him," Peggy says after a moment, sitting down beside Angie on the floor. "I met him ... while we were both at war, I suppose. I didn't know him before. I've imagined, many times, who he was then, before he was taken up by recruitment and then swallowed whole like the rest of us. I've almost got it, I think. But who we are in war time, whether we're soldiers yet or not, really is a separate thing, isn't it? It's our best and our worst and another person entirely. And then, some of us, we learn to kill, and it's that new person who returns to our bed back home, if there is one to which we can return."

Angie's eyes are big, but when her hand finds Peggy's it's steady and warm, fingers curling over her wrist, snaking up the bones until they entwine with her fingers. She's never said this much about what she does. She and Steve never talked about it either; living it was already too much, understanding mutually shared in a silence that forever smells like a burned-out, rained-in, whiskey-drowned pub whenever she cares to revisit it.

"My boy sent me letters. Couldn't hardly spell worth a damn. Half the time I had to figure out what the hell he was trying to say to me."

"I know that feeling," she says, a rueful smile breaking the firm, unhappy line of her lips. "Except it was more of a conversational disadvantage."

"Wasn't a talker, then?"

"Well, he tried."

"Ha! That's just about every man I ever had. 'He tried.' The end."

"He was a good man," Peggy says, looking up. 

"He'd have to be, to get at you like this." Almost shyly, she continues, "You're something special. You don't fall for just anyone."

Peggy squeezes her hand. "What have you been drawing, then?"

"Ah, nothing too fancy. I like patterns, nice shapes, maybe some flowers. What'd your boy draw?"

"Still life, for a while. How he saw the world, what he saw in it. After a time, though, whatever was in his head, he let it leak out all over the page. He was so stoic for so many people, they wouldn't even look down and notice his hands. But I did, and so much took shape on those pages that he would never say aloud."

"Was it very dark?"

"It could be. But he also drew these very beautiful flowers that he'd seen on a march and said made him think of me. I lost the drawing somewhere along the way." It had been destroyed in her pocket during a very close attempted stabbing. Steve had offered to draw her another, but there hadn't been time before ...

Angie opens the book back to where she'd been working. Peggy leans over to look. Flowing lines, gentle sloping curves, moody shading, abstract patterns and swirls. A single daisy in the corner and a few practice attempts above it. It isn't skilled, but it eases something in her to take it in, loosens the coiled spring in her belly that draws itself tight when she isn't looking after it.

What looks like a familiar pair of eyes tucked in by the binding, scribbled over, surprisingly recognizable and good.

"It continues to amaze me how many arts into which you dip your toes and reveal hidden talents, Angie."

"Nah, it's easy, this is just simple stuff. I'd have to take a class or something to learn how to make anything really good."

Peggy is not the sentimental sort, so she doesn't disagree, despite the slight warmth in her chest that blooms when she thinks of the good things in her life because of Angie. But when Angie jokingly offers to draw a portrait of her, she lets her, and it looks nothing like what Steve would have drawn, his own image of Peggy lovingly crafted onto the page with technical prowess and romantic embellishment, but rather this is what Angie sees, as best as she can capture with her limited experience and ability.

And perhaps it's not so shocking that she rather likes what Angie sees, despite its limited resemblance to a person at all. It's good to be reminded, sometimes, that art still exists in the world, even if Steve isn't around to create it, this small thing that was him and not the uniform, that she'd seen him do so many times, that she keeps for herself because everyone else who treasured it is dead or far-flung across Europe. And oddly enough, it feels good to share it after all.

She lets Angie keep the book, and when she fills it up, she leaves another one in her room, with her name penciled into the corner of the inside cover in Peggy's neat cursive. And she fills it up with herself, and shares it with Peggy.


End file.
